


In heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Quantum Leap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-13
Updated: 2003-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-25 08:23:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1641278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for yellowsummer</p>
    </blockquote>





	In heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage

**Author's Note:**

> Written for yellowsummer

 

 

My fourth wife's mother had Alzheimer's. Her brain had turned into Swiss cheese. When Sue and I got married, her mom came to the wedding, but she didn't know where she was and she didn't understand who was getting married. In fact she didn't even recognise her daughter. She was very nice about it - a real lady always behaves well, even when she's plunked down in the middle of a big fancy wedding with a lot of strangers. But about halfway through the evening she started crying, and she couldn't stop, and eventually her 'sitter had to take her back to the nursing home where she was living. If you call it living. 

Sue visited her every week, every Wednesday afternoon for four hours, and every time she'd come back shaking and ready to fly off the handle if I looked at her the wrong way. After the night she bit my head off because I'd switched the TV on for _Star Trek_ instead of _Jeopardy_ , I asked her why she went on visiting a complete stranger who made her feel like shit. Well, I didn't ask it. I screamed it. What the hell, I'm Italian. 

I thought I knew why, you know. Even when I was screaming at her, I thought I knew. Family is family. Your mom is your mom. Even when your mom doesn't know who you are. But I didn't get it: Sue was right when she said that. Well, she didn't say it, she screamed it. What the hell - she was Italian by marriage. 

My best friend is a man so smart he does incredibly stupid things. My best friend did a very stupid thing six years ago. The computer told him no but his instinct told him yes, so he jumped into the accelerator and he - disappeared. 

Oh be honest, Al: he died. 

His body stuck around for six years. I could go visit his body any time I liked. His body lived on in a white room with no mirrors, and behind his familiar eyes a succession of personalities would appear and disappear. None of them knew me. There was an old man from the Deep South, a little girl from an American airbase in West Germany, a convicted murderer who thought he'd had a reprieve, a sexologist who thought I was repressed, and a hundred others who I can't even remember. I'd visit them every time, just like Sue used to visit her mom, and I'd sit and talk with them and find out who they were and what their lives were like - and then I'd run to the imaging chamber and go talk to my dead friend. 

He was alive in the past. Well, all dead people are. He was walking back and forth his own lifetime, chasing the knots in the string. The computer said he was on a mission from God. I never knew if the computer was joking. It was that kind of computer. He was wearing other people's bodies: he looked like other people, the people whose personalities were in his body, but he sounded like himself. When I was talking to him in the imaging chamber, I never thought about him being dead. I spent a lot of time in there, talking to him. 

I couldn't touch him. I could touch his body - I'm head honcho at the Project. It would have taken some doing but I could have fixed it up to be left alone and unobserved with his body, and the personalities inside it didn't count. They might not have understood but they'd have forgotten - forgotten - as soon as they went back to their own time. I could have fixed up a date with his body every week if I'd wanted to. I could. 

But I wouldn't have been touching _him_. I'd have been lying with a stranger in my arms, someone else looking out of his eyes at me, someone who would have had to be persuaded or threatened or drugged into cooperating, someone planted by God to stop me from touching my best friend. If you believe the computer. I don't understand computers. 

I never knew how much I loved him until the day he stepped into the accelerator and died. He was my best friend. He was a good fuck buddy. He liked me. I remember that he liked me even after he died and he couldn't get away from me. For six years I was the only one he could talk to, the one he could ask for help, the one who knew who he was even though he was inside a strange face and a strange body. And I _loved_ him, even though he couldn't touch me, even though he didn't remember anything about our lives. 

When we met he was a confirmed bachelor. Never got involved. Got dumped by a girl in college and fell into his books and never came out. We'd go to ballgames and we'd get drunk together and I'd bully him into going for meals when he hadn't eaten in fourteen hours straight, and I'd bully him into bed when he hadn't slept in thirty-six hours (changing phase the hard way, he'd call it) and if sometimes I stayed around after I'd got him into bed and before he went to sleep, well, no one had to know. He was a sweet guy even in bed, a dazzler if you got him to concentrate, a real nice dancing partner even when he was half asleep. 

Then he wasn't there any more. I couldn't have him, I couldn't touch him, I had him only in my mind. And I knew that I loved him. He was mine in a way that nothing else could duplicate. Other people could see his body. Only I could talk to his soul. 

About halfway through the six years he was dead and alive to me in the past, he did something that changed his past. Suddenly he was married. He'd been married since before I met him. Everyone else remembered he was a happily married man: even I remembered the years that hadn't happened before, when someone else had bullied him into sleeping and eating - and having sex. Only I remembered the nights we'd spent together. He certainly didn't. And outside the imaging chamber, they hadn't happened. God's judgement? I don't know. I never talked it through with Ziggy. Who wants to get advice from a computer? 

Nearly confessed it to a priest once. Stopped when I realised the priest would think I was making up. Never did it again when I realised that maybe I _was_ making it up. What's the difference between remembering sex that never happened and making up fantasies about your best friend? I don't know. Maybe God does. Maybe what he and I did together was such a wrong that God sent him into the past to set it right. 

I don't know. I loved him. Even now we can't find him in past time, even now when his body lies uninhabited and silent... 

His wife has the right to say when we pull the plug on a body with no one home. Not the man who never was his lover. I never was, not any more. 

Here's what I didn't get about loving someone who's dead to you, who doesn't remember ever loving you: it doesn't change a thing. 

I will remember till I die that small happy grunt he'd make when I tucked myself into his arms after a hot sweaty session. I will remember till I die the smell of him, the feel of his cock softening and the silky-wet pulse of semen. I will remember till I die and after what it was to love him, and if God tells me at the gates of Heaven that loving Sam like that was one of the wrongs Sam died to put right, I'm gonna spit in God's eye. 

end 

1327 words 

 


End file.
